Refusing administrative minutiae | Hacker News Reader

Refusing administrative minutiae

37signals.com

55 pointswlll14 comments

Not so long ago, people had secretaries. In fact, my father had a secretary and it wasn't unusual at the time, and he wasn't paid any more than me. I'm not suggesting we bring back secretaries.

There's surely an opportunity here for a start-up with an AI background to analyze what I'm doing at any moment in time and ...

(a) track what I'm doing

(b) help me (intelligently, not clippy)

(d) suggest improvements (it's time for your run!)

This would have to be private software under my control, but if I give you that, you are free to look at everything I do (type, view), use the webcam to see what I'm doing, even follow my cellphone around.

Not so long ago, people had secretaries. In fact, my father had a secretary and it wasn't unusual at the time, and he wasn't paid any more than me

Women were not able to avail of all the job opportunities they are now, so their labour was cheap. Now they have better job prospects.

Nah, I'd say it has more to do with MS Office eliminating the need for typists in 1990 and companies replacing the personnel cost with a smaller licensing cost.

I have a secretary. She is an awesome resource that helps my whole team get more done. Typically, they are folks with humanities degrees who don't want to teach. Where I am, they tend to last about 3-4 years, than transition to project management type roles. They excel there, because after a couple of years tracking down stuff.

A lot of naïvety in this post. Expense tracking sucks, but there are IRS regulations that both employees (contractors included) and businesses must follow.

http://www.irs.gov/taxtopics/tc511.html

You have quite a bit of latitude in how high ceremony your expense tracking needs to be, though. "CC hotel / travel expenses to our standard address, put everything on the company card" is likely adequate, as long as there's a contemporaneous record of business travel. Many places keep that as a formal log book, but since the IRS is pretty much ambivalent about the exact form of your records as long as they capture the important stuff, a Google Calendar entry with "Bob speaking at $FOO_CONF in Boston 3/14" probably suffices. In the event of an audit, you'll be asked to provide supporting documentation (again, wide latitude) of a small sampling of those expenses, because they have no more desire to read five thousand pages of records than you do to write them. If you're unable to provide those records, but don't strike the examiner as actively malicious, they'll say "Alright, there's two ways I can do this. My book says we think you have about $X of legit deductions for this category, which is $Y less than you're claiming. Pay $Y plus our below market interest rate for making an honest mistake. Otherwise, you and I get to do things line by line, and I'm going to suddenly get very picky. Which would you prefer?"

There's also a certain element of "In the vanishingly unlikely event the IRS audited us, disallowed every expense our employees charged in the year, and then charged taxes on those plus the standard penalty interest, that wouldn't cost us enough for us to even notice it."

Spoken like someone who hasn't undergone an IRS audit.

While I agree with David for the most part, his cavalier attitude of "Well, if we get audited it will be cheaper than the cost of tracking shit" is naive. Once he goes through an IRS audit, where they turn everything upside down and consume hundreds and hundreds of hours of time then he might change his attitude of the cost of an IRS audit. They are not nearly as cheap or insignificant as he makes it out to be.

Huh? It's not the lack of paperwork that gets you audited. Your tax returns probably aren't itemized on a customer-by-customer, trip-by-trip basis.

If you get audited, you're in for tens of hours of annoying drama no matter what (in reality, it's your accountant that's going to do all the work).

If you're writing this on the assumption that a small business might handle an audit (or really even simple tax returns) on a DIY basis, get that thought out of your head now. You need an accountant at almost the moment you start seeing revenue in your business.

That depends, my aunt was audited and ended-up with close to a million dollar refund. Here attitude had long been, paying a little extra in taxes is worth not keeping track of every expense. When your actually making real money tracking every lunch has a minimal ROI.

PS: She did still took many large deductions and had reasonable records, she just played it safe when submitting her taxes.

Good point, but if you're too cool to keep receipts, you're probably being a cowboy in other areas of business.

All expenses are indeed tracked by virtue of using a credit card. Electronic receipts are forwarded to a shared email address. For everything else, we're willing to run the risk of an audit that might argue over the purpose of a lunch to save our employees the hassle of expense reporting.

Acceptable risk and cost of running the business.

So, ultimately, someone does do the administrative minutae.. just downstream?

I'd say that kind of refutes this post entirely. Having the right people do a job is a good thing :)

I put my thoughts in a post above, would love to hear what you think.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3504791

In my experience with these minutiae, there is usually additional hidden overhead. Not only do I have a client that requires time recorded daily in 15-minute increments, but they are locked into a system (Deltek) that is incompatible with Google Chrome, forcing ~1/3 of users to switch browsers for this already annoying task. And users must enter login information twice -- once to login to the portal, another for the timekeeping system. And it's been that way for over two years.

There is an opportunity here for those who can break into the consciousness of enterprise Accounting people.

I've integrated enterprise and mid-size accounting systems over the past 15 years. I also have had to run a small consulting shop answering this issue. I think I have something that really works well, but I didn't think anyone else needed it.

I'd like to talk to you more about what you think a solution should look like (I've built, torn down and rebuilt solutions for this space). Mind getting in touch by email?

Interesting. I'm tempted to want to take this post with a grain of salt.

I systemize and automate businesses for a living. With software. Since the mid 90's.

Why a grain of salt?

TIME IS YOUR ONLY PRODUCT AND ASSET. In a consulting business, that's how it is. Why ignore your asset and only product. That's it. Time is finite and it seems to be the major missed point in this article.

A CONSULTING BUSINESS IS NOT A SOFTWARE PRODUCT BUSINESS. The cost to scale a software business is negligible, compared to consulting where you grow relative to the number and quality of people you can find.

I'll say it again, the amount of time you have to sell is relative to the people you have, and how efficient/good they are, and how efficient your management overhead is to leave people free to bill hours.

EVERY BUSINESS IS NOW A SOFTWARE BUSINESS. It doesn't matter what industry they're in. Either they get it, and get with it, or they're gone in 10 years when someone's eating their lunch with little to no effort thanks to a great systemized + automated software system. In many ways, software is the next industrial revolution.

CONSULTING'S HOURLY BREAKDOWN IS DIFFERENT THAN PRODUCTS.

Every consulting dollar is generally cut into 3 parts: - get the work - do the work - manage the work

At a $100/hr rate, you see it's not so pretty when it's more than one or two people.

What does this formula have to do with how you price a software product? I do both and know the difference. :)

CONSULTING PROFITABILITY IS IN SYSTEMIZING AND AUTOMATING, LIKE ANY BUSINESS. Manage each area the best it can be (via enough, but not too much systemization and automate the sh*t out of everything) and you can get a 60-70% profit rate.

I FIND IT HARD TO CONFUSE CONSULTING AND PRODUCT BUSINESSES. With this article, for a consulting business that switched to a product business and then look back and talk about consulting, it all seems a little confusing to me.

WHY? While smaller businesses might be able to get away with a mindset of "it's not important" for a little while, growth unfortunately makes this a "cost of doing business" to manage the "bottom line".

WHAT? Just like we systemize and automate our software products to do everything, administrative minutiae too, can and should be systemized and automated.

HOW? Connect a business' preferred project management tool to billing and accounting systems automatically. This is what I do. I manage several projects with a few hours of time a month that I get paid for dozens of hours of work via my developers. My system is honed and works.

ME: I don't die to track every second, but you better believe I have to track my billing unit, the hour, or fixed price.

There is truth to the idea, though that having to track every second or micromanage means you have the wrong person. You do, however, need some checks and balances to keep things moving on their own for everyone's piece of the pie, and a big part of that is "are we on schedule".

TRICKS: I'm constantly working on my systemization and automation. It will never end, or be perfect because there's always new tools and technologies and processes becoming possible.

Forwarding your receipts to one address, PDF printing all purchases, and writing a quick web app that downloads credit card statements and asks you to link them up to whatever (whether it's the book keeper or not) isn't stoneage thinking. It can be simplified, and should be.

THE ONLY TRUTH I KNOW IN BUSINESS: We still have these business problems. They're not a technology problem, but technology can help.

THOSE MAGICAL PEOPLE WHO SIGN THE CHEQUES. Consulting issues of tracking time are another. Not all customers are comfortable with flat rate. It's easy to puff our chest once we have a practice up and running, but the reality is pricing in consulting is one of the toughest things to get a handle on relative to the place(s) you work, and for the type of work you do.

Finding a middle ground with new clients (seeing if the client is more comfortable with per hour vs fixed fee) is far more important. I always suggest doing a small fixed fee project to build trust in the beginning and make sure both sides are happy. After that being comfortable enough to say "I think I can save you money hourly" is fine. Or not.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com